


Storms Beneath Your Skin

by sinuous_curve



Series: A Concept By Which You Measure [9]
Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: D/s, Emotional Constipation, Headspace, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-17
Updated: 2012-11-17
Packaged: 2017-11-18 21:36:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/565551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinuous_curve/pseuds/sinuous_curve
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Clint is not good at being taken care of. He lacks the practice and easy acquiescence, but. He’s tired enough from the mission and the extract with bullets whizzing past his ears that he lets Bruce say, “Come on. I think you should probably. Sleep would be good for you.”</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Storms Beneath Your Skin

**Author's Note:**

> Prompted, audienced, and beta'd by the lovely locketofyourhair.This is more or less what happens when kink doesn't go according to plan.

Clint and Natasha spend eight weeks on a blackout mission, and he comes back having dropped fifteen pounds and with a splint on two fingers of his right hand. Nat has four sloppy field stitches on her shoulder blade and a slight limp when she walks. Fury meets them on the deck of the helicarrier when their extract transport lands.

“I hope he’s not planning on debriefing us tonight. I don’t--” she says, and bites off with a flat mouth. 

Clint knows what she wants. She wants Pepper and Steve’s easy way of taking care of people, and Tony’s brittle, acidic humor when faced with the people he cares about behind hurt. Clint nudges his elbow against hers and Nat’s mouth turns up fractionally into a small smile. He wants the slow, steady sound of Bruce’s breath; he understands. 

They land and climb out, and Clint presses a small, matte memory stick into Fury’s hand. He’s not ungrateful that technology has progressed to the point where the logistics of smuggling out thousands of pages of files are moot. It’s just mildly disconcerting to think about how many wallets and sets of keys and socks he’s lost, all bigger than that. 

“Well done, agents,” Fury says. He pockets it. “Now go--” There’s the smallest of pauses, then his mouth quirks. “Go home.”

Happy’s waiting for them on the other side of the deck, standing beside the “Official Avengers Aerial Transport,” with his sunglasses on and his arms folded over his chest. It’s just after two in the morning, if Clint’s doing the time conversion right in his head. Happy is, and has always been, mildly uncomfortable around the competency SHIELD manages to exude. 

“Welcome back,” he says. “Come on, they’re all waiting for you. It’s like a bunch of kids on Christmas Eve.” 

Clint exchanges a look with Nat and her eyes crinkle at the corners just slightly. It used to be harder to slough off the long jobs, when they were so deeply entrenched in being other people it was easy to forget the rough strokes of who they really were. (Once, two months in with no end in sight, Clint couldn’t think of his last name for nearly ten minutes. He ended up sitting on the ledge of his hotel window, sixty-three floors up, until he could breathe again.)

It’s fifteen minutes between takeoff and landing on the roof of the Tower. Clint can see the rest of the team standing there in their damn pajamas, with Pepper between Tony and Steve and Jane pressed against Thor’s side. Nat bumps her knee against his and Clint nods, still looking down. He get this, too. What it’s like to not go back to six by six helicarrier quarters with steel walls and fluorescent overhead lights. 

Clint is not particularly comfortable with the looks on their faces when he and Nat climb out of the chopper. He’s not good, still, with that level of easy happiness at _him_. 

Thor’s smile is broad and genuine. “Friends, you are well -- mostly, I see -- and I am glad,” he says, clapping them both on the shoulder. Jane smiles and waggles her fingers in a small wave. She’s wrapped up in one of Thor’s Earth tee shirts and it goes almost to her knees. Clint has ideas that her hair isn’t that rumpled from sleeping, but hey. He can’t fault either of their tastes in people. He thumps Thor on the shoulder with his not-fucked up hand. 

Nat’s been folded into the center of Pepper and Steve and Tony, Pepper’s hands cupped around her jaw. Tony’s snugged up along her back, chin dropped onto her shoulder in a pose that’s so deeply and unconsciously protective Clint doubts he’s particularly aware of what it looks like. Steve reaches out, tucks a piece of hair behind her ear, and his fingers linger on her cheek. 

Clint doesn’t _not_ care about them, but. Bruce stands a little bit back from the rest, wearing baggy plaid pajama pants and a SHIELD tee shirt with a rip in the sleeve that belongs to Clint. He’s got his arms wrapped around his center and he radiates too many things; tempered joy and unsteady relief and the wound up tight it’s been too long distress that Clint, fucked as it may be, missed. 

“What happened to your hand?” Bruce asks. His voice is low and tight. He looks younger without his glasses. 

“It got in a fight with a boot.” 

Bruce nods. “Does it hurt?” 

It’s on the tip of Clint’s tongue to say _yes, but you know I’ll still be able to hurt you worse_ , but Jane is standing there, and Steve. Nat knows as much as Clint is able to convince himself to say, and he gets the sense Tony and Pepper have roughed out the broad strokes, and Thor makes Asgardian courtship sound like a bloodsport. But still. They are two different things in different places. And Bruce should already know that. 

“I’m okay,” Clint says. Then, after a split second of uncertain pause, “Hey. Come here.”

The steps Bruce takes toward him are, at best, unwilling. But he folds against Clint’s chest with a quiet collapse that is as pretty as the way he spasms when he’s being hurt. Clint hesitantly puts his hand between Bruce’s shoulder blades. Then the back of his neck, where the skin is softer and more familiar and Clint knows where the pressure points are.

*

Clint is not good at being taken care of. He lacks the practice and easy acquiescence, but. He’s tired enough from the mission and the extract with bullets whizzing past his ears that he lets Bruce say, “Come on. I think you should probably. Sleep would be good for you.”

He’s not really surprised that Bruce presses the button for the floor designated _C. Barton_ on the control panel. He is slightly more surprised when he sees the rumpled sheets and Bruce’s glasses folded on the side table, on top of the latest journal of decaying quark particles something or the other. 

“I’m sorry,” Bruce says. “I. Ah. Should have ask--”

Clint bites off the last of the word with his thumb pushing into Bruce’s mouth. Bruce never really seems to know how to react to affection or initiation or anything outside of the eight by eight concrete box that constitutes their room. Unless Clint doesn’t give him the ten seconds he needs to start overthinking. Clint is tired and he does hurt deep down in his bones and joints. He’s not good at needing any more than he is at being taken care of but.

Necessity is the mother of adaptation. 

“It’s fine,” Clint says, slipping his spit wet thumb over Bruce’s bottom lip. “Hand to God. Let’s go to bed.”

The thing is that neither of them have any experience with _this_. When they left behind practicality and slipped sideways into whatever it is they have, they went somewhere Clint has never been before. You don’t take targets home after you’ve cut them into vomiting up what you need to know. You don’t stitch them back together and push them into the shower.

You don’t think about them all the time, and they don’t sleep in your bed even when you’re not there. Clint has had Nat and no one else for longer than a night, and even then. The negotiation of those clashes leaves him cold and uncomfortable, unable to improvise or find the headspace he needs to be really good at what he does. Nat’s the one who once murmured in his ear, “You don’t like people, you like willing victims,” and that’s as good an explanation for his sexuality as he’s ever found. 

Bruce crawls into bed and lays on his side with one arm beneath his pillow. He watches, eyes half-closed with his thumbnail between his teeth. 

Clint strips off his tee shirt and tosses it toward the laundry chute. He’s got a couple bruises smattered over his skin, but nothing drastic. He sits on the edge of the bed to unlace his boots and feels Bruce’s eyes skim and up and down his spine. Clint took a kick to the back that left the very faint impression of a steel toed boot beneath his shoulder blades. He’s fairly certain Bruce wants to touch it. Clint kicks off his boots and strips off his socks. 

For a moment he very seriously thinks about sleeping in his pants, but they’re smeared with dirt and blood. It seems unfair, he guesses, to Bruce. And too the sheets, but Clint’s tired enough that he’s not even going to pretend that he’s really worried about the fucking Egyptian cotton sheets Tony insists on putting down for. He pops the buttons with his good hand and shimmies them off. In his boxers, sitting there, Clint is suddenly, violently aware of how tired he is. 

He flinches a little when Bruce’s hand touches his shoulder. “Clint?”

Clint is not, is _not_ , going to be that person who cuts himself open and lays the demons and nightmares on the floor. He won’t and he can’t, because Bruce has enough of his own monkeys clinging to his back. He doesn’t need more. 

“I’m just a little wound up,” Clint says. “Time zones and shit.”

He hears the soft rustle of sheets and then the mattress dips and Bruce is a warm presence behind him. Bruce pauses, hand on Clint’s shoulder. He’s not all that much better at this than Clint is. There’s probably a comparison to be made between the trajectories of their lives and the men they ended up becoming, but. Clint’s not one for introspection, either. 

Then, hesitantly, Bruce’s other hand is on Clint’s other shoulder. His palms are warm and more callused than Clint ever expects from someone who spent their first SHIELD paycheck fitting out a library with reference texts. Clint can feel ten distinct points of contact from Bruce’s fingers, despite how delicate their touch still is. 

“I.” Bruce begins and stops. 

Carefully, he slides his hands over Clint’s shoulders and down his chest. Clint can’t help his first reaction being to roll his shoulders in, because he can count on one hand the number of times he’s ever had someone pressed against his back and not had to put a knife in their ribs. It’s contradictory to how they’re supposed to work, with Bruce dressed and Clint not. 

Bruce presses his face to Clint’s shoulder. 

The last Clint had him that close, Bruce was strapped down to the chair while Clint shocked the soles of his feet with a cattle prod. Bruce was falling apart in beautiful inches and Clint fisted his fingers in Bruce’s hair and yanked him close. He whispered in Bruce’s ear, “You can’t do a goddamn thing to stop me,” and Bruce sobbed with _release_. 

“You missed me?” Clint asks, trying for levity and not finding it. 

Bruce inhales sharply. “The tops of my thighs look like. Graph paper.”

On the short list of things Clint told Bruce he had permission to do while he was out of contact was taking the small, sharp paring knife he uses in the lab to skin that couldn’t been seen every day. Away from any major blood vessels. Just deep enough to break the skin. Clint, when he started to lose who he is in the field, thought about what he was going to come back to. He no longer expects Bruce to have moments where he breaks, he expects obedience. 

It’s not even a surprise that Clint gets obedience. Which says something, too.

“You know this is what I do. It hasn’t killed me yet.”

Bruce huffs against his skin. “I. I know. I just.”

Someday? They’re going to have to start saying this shit out loud, but Clint’s not a hero or brave. He reaches across his chest with his good hand and pushes his fingers into Bruce’s hair. It’s soft; he showered before he went to bed. 

“I know,” Clint says. “I’m tired. Let’s go to sleep.”

Clint is tired and they do lay down on their separate sides. He’s fairly certain he wouldn’t be able to sleep for the adrenaline burning coppery in the back of his mouth if they tried to touch. But Bruce’s presence is there, in the way the blankets and sheets move when he shifts and the soft sounds he makes. Clint doesn’t fall asleep until Bruce’s breathing goes heavy and slow and steady. 

Until Clint reaches across the space that divides them and touches the tips of his fingers to the center of Bruce’s back.

*

Clint sleeps for almost thirty hours, only rolling out of bed long enough to piss and drink water from the bottles he finds on the side table. He’s been doing this long enough to recognize his own stress reactions, and the patterns they take. Nat gets an unholy level of energy from almost dying and Clint just wants to sleep.

It’s bright and early when he really wakes up, disconcertingly like he didn’t sleep through the majority of a day. He still hurts, but. He feels better. Which is mostly what he asks for. Even his splinted fingers look just slightly less like someone ground the heel of their boot against them. Clint doesn’t often wish that he was as -- singular, as some of his teammates. But he’d take the healing factor in a heartbeat. 

Yawning, with slow, indolent muzziness still clinging to his skin, Clint pushes back the blankets and hauls himself up. He notes, before anything else, that Bruce’s half the bed is empty but the sheets are mussed. Clint doesn’t remember him coming to bed the night before. But, in all fairness, the only really strong memory he has of the last day is waking up which is throat bone dry and closing up, and someone -- Bruce, he knows it was Bruce, why pretend otherwise -- pushing a water bottle into his hand and telling him it was okay. 

There’s a new, unopened bottle on the side table. Clint grabs it, twists off the cap, and downs half in long, careful gulps. His bones feel too close to his skin, but that much is nothing new. He and Nat aren’t particularly adept at keeping track of the little shit on the best days and when they’re in the field they both tend to reduce down to granola bars and water, interspersed with eating everything they can find. 

He’s trying not to overthink the night they got back. He’s trying not to overthink Bruce, and the ‘graph paper’ on his thighs, and not being able to settle without touching Bruce. 

Clint sighs, rubbing his palm over his face and through his hair. He sets the water bottle back on the side table and drops his head down between his knees. In the grand scale of long range missions, eight weeks is barely _anything_ He and Nat have been on assignments where eight weeks was just long enough to establish their cover. But’s different and Clint isn’t stupid and he doesn’t lack all self awareness. He knows why it’s different. 

He just doesn’t. Know what to do about it. 

“Okay,” Clint says quietly. “Fuck it. Deal with it.”

He pushes himself up and lets the momentum carry him into the bathroom. Ninety percent of the time Clint thinks Tony’s ostentation in the Tower is obnoxious in some way that winds around being a fucking carnie with two square feet to call his own. But the bathrooms, and the three wall shower things Clint has never _really_ minded. 

It does feel good to have hot water sluicing over his skin without the real, conscious, valid fear that someone’s going to break down the door and haul him out with a knife pressed to slippery skin. Clint, for the most part, has gotten over the instinctive shying away from fighting naked that most people have. But, he feels reasonably, it’s not his favorite way to go into a brawl. 

He stands with his head bowed to the spray, eyes closed. When he closes his eyes he sees Bruce, and when he sees Bruce his chest seizes up. 

If Bruce had just looked _relieved_ (and even glad, and grateful, and all the things teammates are allowed to feel) Clint would know where they stood. He would know that the way things have begun to shift hasn’t upended the bedrock of what they started with. Sex doesn’t have to mean anything; it can be as much a tool as his knife and rope. 

Clint knows how to work with those tools, within the confines of hurt and torture. But they’re stepping out of that and Clint doesn’t know how to lead to these places. 

He asks, “Jarvis, what time is it?” when he gets out of the shower. Tony assures them that Jarvis can see them, but he’s a paragon of discretion and fiercely loyal. (Clint can’t stop himself from mentally adding _loyal to Tony_ , and he’s forced himself to come to terms with the fact that he will never like having AI always watching him.) Still, he’s useful, even if only the glorified Google way Clint tends toward. 

“Ten thirty-one AM, Agent Barton,” Jarvis replies. 

“Where is, ah. Doctor Banner?” 

“Doctor Banner is in the radiation laboratory, sir. He is with Mister Stark.”

Clint nods, even though there’s no one to direct the acknowledgement to.

*

Clint passes Thor and Jane watching a movie in the living room, gets a, “Hail, friend, and well met. I am glad to see you risen from bed,” with that smile Thor has. The one that’s so damn sincere Clint really does partially believe he’s spent the last eight weeks worrying about when they would get back and if they would be in one piece.

He waves and nods in acknowledgement. He’s just not fucking good at this. At accepting worry and friendship gracefully. 

Bruce and Tony are in the radiation lab, sitting facing each other in rolling chairs with Tony’s laptop open on the table beside them. They’ve both got goggles with polarized lenses looped around their necks, and the lead-lined experiment aprons are piled haphazardly beside the computer. Tony’s talking animatedly, gesticulating and pointing with that half-manic, unrestrained force that always makes Clint want to check his pocket for a knife. 

It’s not that he doesn’t trust Tony, he does. Most days. It’s that Tony is only a couple bad choices away from being one of the monsters the Avengers fight. 

Bruce is listening, nodding along with a more restrained thoughtful expression. He’s got one hand on his thigh, kneading absently with his palm like the muscle aches. Clint’s stomach, separated from Bruce by two walls of reinforced, bulletproof glass, twists up tight and hot in his pelvis. With the other hand Bruce rubs the back of his neck, and his knuckles are scraped a little raw. Clint bets he was punching a bag strung up next to Steve’s, fighting the acidic green rise in his eyes. 

(Clint is almost positive he saw injection marks in the inside of Bruce’s arms. The kind with a faint red ring around them that means someone pumped him full of the Hulk inhibitor Tony made. That option Clint has never, and has no right, take away. Still. The necessity of it claws at the back of his skull in a refrain of _why what happened why_.)

He presses his palm to the scanner to signal his presence. He can see Tony and Bruce stop and cock their heads; Tony looks at Bruce, raising his eyebrow in the nonverbal communication he and Bruce have developed in fits and starts over the hours they’ve spent sequestered in the labs. Clint can do it with Nat, and Coulson to an extent. And Bruce, but he doesn’t need Bruce looking at him. 

Tony stands after a beat of back and forth, and the door lock disengages. Clint slips in and punches his code into the second panel, to prove that it’s him. (And not a clone, or a robot, or a skrull, or anything else that might be made to look like him.) The second door slides back and Tony says, “I’m gonna go. Get lunch or something.”

Clint raises an eyebrow. 

“I got it,” Tony says, raising his hands. “He’s fucking useless today, so fix it.”

And then Tony’s gone, the door slid shut and pressurized behind him, and the quiet in the lab is suddenly very loud. Clint pushes his hands into his pockets, which is an old gesture of discomfort he hasn’t pulled out since the very early days of SHIELD. Back then, it was a tangible way to keep himself from lashing out in rage. Now it’s because he doesn’t know what to do with his hands when he’s around Bruce. 

“Did I--” Clint starts, then huffs out a breath. “Did I miss anything yesterday?”

Bruce’s chair squeaks a little when he turns, trailing the toes of his worn brown shoes on the tile floor. He’s got lines of tiredness and worry etched in sprays from the corners of his eyes and bracketing his mouth, and faint dark circles between his eyes and cheeks. His hand keeps kneading absently on his thigh. 

“Ah.” Bruce shrugs. “No, not. Not really.”

The thing is that Bruce isn’t even trying to keep himself from fucking radiating the need that pours off him. Because it always comes down to need, even on the very few occasions when Bruce has ever more explicitly laid out his wants. Bruce looks at Clint through his eyelashes, shoulders rolled in like he’s bracing himself to absorb the shock of a blow. 

They fucking sleep in the same bed most nights. And the days when Bruce really was so fucking innately strung out that they _needed_ to do that are far behind them. Because it works, Clint thinks a little hollowly, this inexplicable thing they do works for Bruce, and for Clint. No matter how many little pieces Clint thinks this should be biting away from them both. It doesn’t. 

“You want me to hurt you,” Clint says. 

His voice is caught somewhere between who he shows and what he is. The pitch is awkward, too high for one and too low for the other. He frowns, shaking his head a little. Bruce’s eyes have gone big, and cautious. Clint pulls his hands out of his pockets and rubs his palms against his thighs. He’s wearing soft sweats and a tee shirt and his middle fingers twinge. 

“You want me,” Clint says, and then it’s right. Something clicks. “To hurt you.” 

Bruce inhales sharply. “Yes,” he says, sounding like a crack has split him in half. “Yes, please.” 

“Say it.” 

“I want you to hurt me,” Bruce says, words tripping over themselves to land in an ungraceful pile at Clint’s feet. He can hear the things that color them; the “I miss you,” and, “I was so worried,” that Bruce isn’t saying, and might not even really understand that he’s feeling. And that’s fine, because Clint has the same rock in the bottom of his chest that he’s not going to acknowledge. 

Clint nods. He shoves all the shit away. He makes himself empty. “Show me how you hurt yourself.”

*

Bruce sheds his socks and shoes and pants, and sits on the table.

It’s tall enough that his feet don’t touch the floor, and the way he absently swings them back and forth makes Clint think of the few memories he has of his mother, sitting on the kitchen counter while she cooked and hummed beneath her breath with a bruise on her cheek. Bruce curls his hands around the table’s edge and bows his head. Clint can see the unsteadiness of his breath in the too controlled rise and fall of his shoulders. 

Clint can see the lines that crisscross over the tops of his thighs. The scabs are dark red and the lines straight, and thin, and precise. Bruce has a deft touch, which people never seem to expect. But then again, Clint’s fairly certain most people (even the other Avengers, to an extent) have trouble delineating the parts that are Bruce from the parts that are the Hulk. 

He is less interested in those, which he expected to come back to, than the injection marks. 

“You did exactly what you were told,” Clint says. He doesn’t turn it into a question, because he wants Bruce to tell him without being prompted. It matters, in the deep down place in his gut where he shoves all the things about this that he can’t easily cope with. 

Bruce looks up. His knuckles go white from how tight he’s holding onto the edge of the table. “Something else happened,” he says, after several moments of silence. The words come out unwilling and, Clint thinks, tinged with shame. 

“Tell me.” 

“We were put on alert, because of a threat,” Bruce says, worrying at his bottom lip with his teeth. “It was maybe Hydra, maybe AIM, maybe God only knows. It was a false alarm, but. We all felt you and Nat not being there. I--”

Clint’s gut wants him to cross the room and do _something_. But he can’t, and he won’t. There are some things that have stayed consistent, and they don’t have a foundation of ease and kindness. Changing that now would be too fundamental a shift, and Clint doesn’t think he can stomach being the one to do that. 

“You?” he prompts. 

Bruce sighs. “I don’t remember what Fury said. I don’t even think that he meant anything by it, because Fury isn’t the type to do that. Without purpose, at least. But Tony took it the wrong way, and then Steve jumped in, and suddenly the entire table was in a shouting match that had nothing to do with what was happening and everything to do with how afraid we were. I’m not. I’m not as good at fear and the other guy is.”

Clint is not the person Bruce goes to when it comes to the science behind the other guy. Clint is the person Bruce goes to so the other guy doesn’t reshape his bones. 

But what they know about him -- they being Bruce, for the most part, and Tony and SHIELD scientists to a lesser degree -- passes around the tower like any rumor. Like how everyone knows that Clint was a carnie despite the fact that he’s never told anyone, or how Clint just _knows_ that Steve was fucking Howard Stark in the forties even though Steve goes thin lipped and quiet whenever anyone asks him about the past. 

Clint knows the Hulk isn’t just a heart rate and adrenaline thing. He’s that, and emotion and stress and a thousand conflicting, interconnected factors that wind up tight in Bruce’s DNA. The only thing Clint has ever heard Bruce say is that if it were just stress? Just his heart rate? He would have had to find a way to kill himself. Because every emotion a human being can have can cause those physical reactions.

The other guy is better with rage, and fear, and all the lizard brain shit emotions that make you taste metal in the back of your mouth. 

“What happened?” Clint asks. 

Bruce shrugs. “I don’t. I don’t really remember. I was sitting there with my eyes closed, trying to breathe through it, and I knew I wasn’t. I can feel my skeleton start to reform, you know? Before it really shows. I heard the tone of the shouting change and it was like the other guy. Just lost patience. And when I woke up I was in the anti-Hulk box.”

Clint skims his hand through his hair. He thinks _now we know it works_ and doesn’t say it, because he can’t without them having to think about the alternative. What would have happened if it didn’t. 

Guilt is a lump in his throat. 

His job, his responsibility, is to keep that shit from happening.

“Did you break anything?” Clint asks. His voice is steadier in his own ears that he feels like it should be. Too calm by half, too certain, too controlled, too much of all the things he should feel and doesn’t. It’s not possible to want to take some apart inch by inch and then want to put them bed so they can rest afterward. They are diametric desires. 

Bruce shakes his head. “No, not really. I mean, the chair. But nothing aside from that. Tony was standing right next to me, and he’s got. Good reflexes.” 

The problem, Clint realizes, is that Bruce is looking at him with the expectation and the _need_ for punishment. 

No. The problem is that Clint doesn’t think he did anything wrong. 

Shit happens. If there is nothing else Clint has learned since the day he and his brother were shunted into foster care, with blood arcing through the air behind his eyelids every time he blinked, it’s that. Shit happens, and you can fight it and you have to do the best you fucking can to negate it and control it. But the universe tends toward chaos, and that’s as certain a fact as there is to know. 

It’s not Bruce’s fault that his shit takes a more spectacular tack than most people’s. Clint can’t blame him for having to find a way to live his life constantly trying to hold a lit stick of dynamite and trying to keep it from going off. 

Clint crosses the ten feet of empty space between them. He’s conscious of upped speed of his heart and the prickling of the small hairs on the nape of his neck. In a perfect world all of this would be as easy as rolling over in bed and pull Bruce to his chest, but. Clint’s the kind of person who reacts with fists and knives when he’s touched without expecting it and Bruce has nightmares that leave his skin a shifting mess of white and green. Probably in a perfect world they would never have met at all.

He stops with Bruce’s knees pressed against his hips. “I’m going to give you what you need,” Clint says. It’s a deviation, and he knows it. But he needs to encompass more than just the pain, he needs. Really, he needs to fucking deal with his shit before it comes back to fuck them both over. “We’ll figure out something better for next time,” he says. “You understand there will be a next time?”

Bruce nods. “I do.”

“Good.”

Clint splays his hands over Bruce’s thighs. He can feel the crosshatched raised lines from whatever he used to cut himself open with. There’s something appealing, almost pretty, about the care with which they were placed. And maybe there’s something mildly less unhinged about the precision, rather than the deep, ugly hacking marks Bruce has left on himself before. 

Clint claws up his fingers, minus the two splinted ones, and drags his nails down Bruce’s thighs, slow and hard. 

Bruce sucks in a small, surprised breath. His eyes slip half shut and his shoulders come up a little. He tips his head back, so Clint is looking at the exposed line of his throat, and his adam’s apple bobbing as his swallows. 

The cuts open back up and will with thin streams of blood that run hot and slick beneath Clint’s hands. The sharply antiseptic smell of the lab suddenly cuts with the raw, coppery tang of blood. And it settles Clint, it really does. He doesn’t care that he’s going to have to ask SHIELD medical for a new split, because he got blood on the one he has. Or that he’ll have to explain where the fucking blood came from in the first place. 

“How often did you do this?” 

Bruce exhales shakily. “Every other day, roughly.” 

“Was it enough?” Clint asks. 

“I.” Bruce’s eyes flutter closed. Clint returns his hands to the tops of Bruce’s thighs and starts back down again. His nails catch on the cuts, pulling them open and turning them deeper and uglier than they were. 

Clint stops when he doesn’t answer. “Don’t lie to me,” he says flatly. “Do not.”

Bruce shakes his head. “For a while. But it was a long time.”

*

What Clint could have, but didn’t, predict was how deeply the repercussions of what they do affect them both. And how long, and far the ripples last.

He knows how to clean up a body; he can dump it in an alley wrapped in trash bags or in a canal weighted down with chunks of concrete or even how to parcel it out into easily moved and managed pieces. (The truth is that Clint is not a very good person, and joining SHIELD did nothing to fix that. It, in many ways, just honed the shitty things he was already good at.) 

Clint even knows how to crack someone over the head so the last forty-eight hours of their life will become nothing but a blank space of deleted time. For the moments when there’s room to be forgiving, or kind. Most of the time, even those people that do retain some hazy grasp on what happened to them are fairly effectively gagged by fear. Clint is not who they send to do PR.

Still. He should have _known_. And he should have done better. 

“I will give you --” Clint says. He thinks _recourse_ and _protection_ and says, “Instructions. For next time.”

Bruce nods. “Thank you.”

Clint flinches a little, at the gratitude that’s not coerced are spat out in anger and fear. Coulson taught him what an effective technique it can be to make people thank you for the things you’re doing to them. It shifts the dynamic from interrogation being something that is done to a victim to the victim having done something to deserve what’s happening. It’s a little obvious, in the light of day, but Clint rarely does he work in the day. 

“Where are you at now?” Clint asks. 

“I’m, ah. Better,” Bruce says, quirking a corner of his mouth up into a wry, unsteady smile. “I’m not. It’s easier when I’m not worried on top of everything else.”

Clint nods. “Good. Are we clear for tonight?”

His gut says to haul Bruce down to their room now, string him up and shock away the aftertaste of an unwanted shift. But it’s been eight weeks, Clint makes himself remember, and he needs to be sharper than he is. His own foundation is too unsteady in this moment, when the lab equipment humming and the world trying to spiral in tight to the scent of Bruce’s blood. This isn’t about them, it’s about Bruce. He needs back to that. 

“Yes,” Bruce says. He sounds so much infinitely more certain.

*

Clint stands in the doorway of the nearest bathroom and watches Bruce patch himself up. If the world was just he would look a little ridiculous, standing in boxers and button down and bare feet, wiping blood off his thighs and taping over the cuts with rows of neat bandages. But he just looks small, worn down in a way that makes Clint’s missing body weight and fucked fingers seem massively insignificant.

Tony comes back as Bruce is tying his shoes back up, with a plastic bottle of the green shit he drinks under one arm and a tray with two sandwiches in the other. “All better?” he asks flippantly, but there’s a crease of a genuine concern between his brows. 

“Never more,” Clint says, smiling thinly. Bruce nods, shoving his fingers through his hair. He does that when he’s feeling uncertain, toying with his hair and clothes like he’ll be able to distract from the dimness of his smile by constant motion in his hands. 

Clint beats a quick retreat, with unsettled restlessness shifting beneath his skin. He still aches, and he still has bruises and contusions that he declined to allow SHIELD medical to take more than the most cursory glance at. He goes to the kitchen and takes two Advil from the half-empty bottle in the cupboard over the stove. He has to stretch up on tip toe to reach, and it makes his back twinge in complaint. 

He hesitates in the kitchen, circling the tip of his finger around the rim of his water glass. He wants to go to the range, but he doubts his accuracy will be anything other than shot to shit with him being so sore. Clint knows himself, and his own competitiveness and need to be more than normal humans should be able to, well enough to understand that shooting off target will just leave him more pissed. 

A little voice in his head says _You’re avoiding_ , and it sounds like Nat and Coulson talking in unison. Clint grimaces to the empty kitchen island, and knocks back the rest of the water. 

He knows. He knows he is. 

He puts his glass in the sink, wipes his hands on his thighs, and sets off for the back staircase. At this point, Clint’s not maintaining a whole lot of illusions about how secret this thing and Bruce do is. But habits are habits, and his skin is crawling, and there’s something uncomfortable declarative in taking the elevator down where he knows Jarvis and Tony and any Avengers checking on the security feeds will be able to see him. 

It’s cooler in the stairwell than in the rest of the tower. Clint’s feet echo in the space as he jogs down the concrete steps in a spiral that makes him oddly, a little seasick. He chalks it up to too much sleep and stress and the odd way coming off missions always fucks with his equilibrium. He counts off the floors in his head: one, basement, sublevel one, sublevel two, to the last actual floor before they hit the hangars and the gigantic carved out spaces where Tony does flight tests on the Iron Man suit when he doesn’t have time to get way to somewhere more spacious. 

The lights dim automatically in response to a lack of movement, but they obligingly buzz back to life when Clint starts down the hall. This last mission, he spent eight hours in an abandoned apartment building with the target strapped to a metal lawn chair while Nat stood at his shoulder with her arms crossed over her chest. Clint didn’t think about Bruce for a single second once he pulled out his smallest, sharpest knife and looked at the mark with a bright, easy, feral grin. 

Clint doesn’t obsess. That is part and parcel of what makes him so fucking good. His conscience doesn’t rear up in the aftermath, spitting useless guilt and prostration all over the practical reality of what he has to do. 

“Get it fucking together,” Clint tells himself, opening the door to their room with a small metal key he always carries around his neck. 

The room has not changed. 

Clint thinks, looking at the scatter of tools over the table and the crooked cant of the chair in the center, it very literally hasn’t been touched since he hauled Bruce down the night before he and Nat had to leave. There are raised spatters of blood on the concrete floor that never got scrubbed up, because there wasn’t time. The rope Clint used to tie Bruce’s hands behind his back is still coiled on the floor. 

Reflex kicks in and carries him over to table, to straighten out the knives and check their sharpness against his thumb. They’re all good, still, though he sets two aside to be better cleaned. The battery on the cattle prod only has about half charge left, but that’s fine. He straightens the chair and picks up the rope, winding it into a neat coil and setting it on the seat. 

Clint scuffs his foot against the dried blood and it doesn’t flake or smear and he decides, half in deference to his hurt and half from something he lacks a good explanation for, that he’ll leave it. He’ll let it seep into the concrete and stain it brown until they have to break up the floor with jackhammers to get rid of it. 

He still has restlessness in his skin. This odd feeling that he’s forgetting something, or not doing something he has to do. 

Clint laces his fingers behind his head and closes his eyes. His fucked joints twinge hard and he ignores it. He didn’t even realize they were that messed up until he and Nat stopped running and she said, “Shit,” grabbing his hand and splaying out her fingers. She talked to herself in low, tight Russian while she wrapped ripped off pieces of her shirt around them. Nat does that when she’s wound up. 

He doesn’t really know what he’s doing, Clint thinks, opening his eyes. That’s the problem. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.

*

Night takes a long time to come on, and by the time it does Clint is strung tight as piano wire and calm center feels about a thousand miles away. He sits at the table for dinner, picking at a plate of Steve’s spaghetti. It’s good -- the few dishes Steve knows how to make are always good -- the noodles are gluey in Clint’s mouth and he barely tastes any of it.

He watches Bruce across the table, sitting between Tony and Thor with his glasses sliding down his nose and a small, nearly content smile turning up the corners of his mouth a very little bit. He actually eats, which is good, since Bruce is the one most likely to just forgo meals because he forgot or was busy or didn’t feel like eating. Clint’s prone to chalk that up to his years on the run and Bruce still not being used to easy, plentiful access to food. But that’s another thing on the outside of what Clint and Bruce do that’s managing to creep in past the borders Clint threw up. 

It’s exhausting, trying to keep track of all the things no one has asked him to care about. 

Halfway through, Nat knocks the back of her hand against Clint’s wrist and he almost drops his fork. “What?”

Nat raises her brows, pushing her own fork through the remains of her food. She’s got her hair pulled back from her face, which always makes her look a little younger. Clint can just see the faint hint of a bruise on her neck; it’s high enough that he’ll bet Tony over Pepper or Steve. She looks at him thoughtfully and says nothing. 

Clint is pricklingly conscious of the other people at the table, even if they aren’t paying attention to him. Their presence grates. 

“I’m fine,” Clint says under his breath. “Just tired, Nat. It was a long mission.”

She nods. “I know,” she says. “I was there, too.”

Coming from anyone else it would feel like needling, but it’s Nat. Clint knows her better than that, so he bites down the sharp things that flare up in the back of his throat and want to claw their way out. He swallows, sets his fork down on his plate and shifts toward her. “Yeah, I know,” he says quietly. “I’ve got it handled, Nat.”

Nat’s mouth quirks down in a frown for a split second that Clint only notices because he knows her so well. “I believe you,” she says, shrugging. “Just checking in.”

Thor and Jane are the first to leave the table, which surprises no one. She has to be back in New Mexico tomorrow, and the look on her face says she has a variety of things to accomplish with Thor before then. Not much later Clint catches the significant look Pepper gives Tony, her fingers twitching toward Nat. Tony so very casually elbows Steve in the side and Clint wonders if, really, they think they’re not noticed. 

Nat rolls her eyes. “I’m tired,” she says, standing. “I’m going to bed.”

Pepper, Tony, and Steve barely even pretend they’re not following her. 

Clint looks at Bruce, sitting with his hands curled on either side of his plate. Bruce looks back, head cocked slightly to the side like he’s trying to think of what to say. The last thing Clint wants is to talk about the things that are changing, and maybe it’s cowardice? But he doesn’t particularly care. 

“Go downstairs,” Clint says. “I’ll be there.”

Bruce nods and stands and there’s something not quite eager, but rather anticipatory in the way he walks toward the stairwell. Clint watches him go and doesn’t move, thinking about the cuts on his thighs and the way his chest felt when Clint reached across the space between them in bed and touched his chest.

*

Clint is not centered when he opens the door to their room.

Which is fine, he thinks. He doesn’t always come to their thing as balanced as he needs to be. They work on a principle of necessity that’s governed by Bruce, and in which Clint is a mechanism and a tool. 

Bruce stands in the middle of the room, hands clasped behind his back with his head bowed. The rise and fall of his shoulders is steady and certain and sure. 

Clint comes up behind Bruce, grabbing Bruce’s wrist with his good hand and yanking up behind his back. The noise Bruce makes is shocked, but relieved. He fight as Clint slams him against the wall, but not as hard as the mark Clint did the same to three days before. Marks don’t shiver like that when their cheekbones impacts against solid concrete. 

“I’m gonna --” Clint says, then swallows hard and shakes his head. “I’m gonna hurt you.” 

The words tumble too fast and wild out of his mouth and Clint bares his teeth to the back of Bruce’s neck. Bruce is shaking beneath his hands, anticipatory and vibrating. He makes a soft, distressed sound and Clint looks down and realizes he’s pushing to the point where something in Bruce’s physiology will have to break, whether it’s his arm or his shoulder popping out of joint. 

“Do you want that?” Clint growls, easing up by unwilling inches. 

Bruce nods frantically. His body is wound tight along Clint’s chest. He pushes back against Clint, probably without realizing he’s doing it. Bruce is so terribly bad at asking for the things he wants, and the only reason he has made himself capable of asking for what he needs is because he’s afraid of the consequences for losing control. 

Clint releases Bruce’s wrist and wraps his hand around the base of Bruce’s skull. He feels off tempo from the practiced ease he usually has with all marks, but especially with Bruce. Always with Bruce, since the first couple weeks when there was too much choked down panic thrumming through every single moment that passed between them. Clint has this learning curve down, he _knows_ what he’s doing, and it doesn’t feel as sharply honed as it should. 

_You’re fine_ , Clint tells himself, shoving Bruce across the room and throwing him down into the chair. It scrapes a few inches backward from the force, bouncing off the wall hard enough to almost send Bruce to the floor on his hands and knees. Clint snags a messy handful of zip ties from his tool table and crouches in front of Bruce on one knee. He ties Bruce’s wrists to the arm of the chair, and doesn’t realize he forgot to check how tight he yanked the plastic until he’s upright again. 

Bruce flexes his fingers, eyes wide and dark. He looks so fucking small. It has never made sense to Clint, how the Hulk can be the size he is while Bruce is so unassuming. He carries himself like a scared rabbit half the time, shoulders rolled in and hands held close like he’s afraid to take up too much fucking room. 

Clint slaps him open handed across the face. 

The chair _rocks_ up onto two legs and slams back down with a jarring clatter. Bruce’s glasses -- Clint forgot about those, too -- go flying off his face and hit the wall. They land with a soft, metallic clatter and the grating crunch of broken glass. Guilt, the same kind that welled up when he saw the insufficient marks Bruce left on his own skin, bubbles up in the back of Clint’s throat. 

When Bruce jerks his head back up, his cheek is bright red and starting to swell. He’s going to have a bruise in the morning. Clint thinks, randomly, of his mother standing in the bathroom with the door almost closed. He thinks of her touching her fingers to her face and humming under her breath with her eyes bright. Clint blinks, and shakes his head. He needs to dislodge her, because she has no place here. 

Bruce is watching him with those big, bright eyes. There is such terrible, awful, consuming need in his expression. It could swallow someone whole. 

Clint slaps him again. 

Bruce rocks again and the chair swings over so far that Clint thinks it really is going to tip over. His first, instinctive reaction is fucking _catch it_ , when he knows better than that. He knows that kindness doesn’t have a place in this thing, in what they do, and he knows that Bruce isn’t looking for someone to. To save him. He’s looking for a way to keep the white noise down to a bearable level. 

“Is that what you want?” Clint asks. His voice is pitched low instead of high, breathless and strung out. 

Bruce pushes forward, straining his wrists against the ties. Clint shifts back on his heels, scrubbing his hand over his face. The position makes the muscles strung along and his spine and over his shoulder blades suddenly flare with deep, hard, aching pain and Clint flinches, swallowing down a surprised grunt of distress. He stands too fast, and turns, gritting his teeth to the concrete wall with Bruce’s eyes a tangible weight on the back of his neck. 

He forgot the clean the knives he pulled out -- they are, hopefully, still upstairs in his bedroom on the dresser. Beside his kit, actually, where he dropped them and never quite got his head back around to it. Which is stupid, Clint thinks, trailing his fingers over the knives left behind. He knows better than to just ignore his tools like that, and the omission rankles. 

Clint picks up the smallest on he has, blade sharp and bright. He doesn’t use it very often, because it cuts almost too easily. He’s slices his own fucking fingers open with it, and not noticed until almost a minute later when the cut finally started to seep blood. He curls his hand around the insubstantial handle until his knuckles go white, and waits for the voice in the back of his head that says good idea or bad. 

It doesn’t say anything that Clint can hear, not over his heart pounding the rush of white noise. He thinks _this is wrong_ and he thinks _what the fuck is wrong with you_ and ignores it all to stumble across the room and shove himself into Bruce’s personal space. 

Clint puts the knife to the collar of Bruce’s shirt and Bruce inhales, sharp and low. His spine suddenly straightens like it never just _does_ , and he tips his head back. The line of his throat is taut and exposed. Clint thinks that at this point the actual mark was babbling, so piss his pants scared that four different language came pouring out with no semblance of actual meaning. 

Bruce isn’t afraid. Bruce doesn’t get what Clint can do. Bruce is breakable. Bruce is _looking_ at Clint with that godawful trust. 

Clint pulls Bruce’s shirt tight as best he can with his hand as fucked up as it is, and cuts down the center of his shirt. The soft cotton parts without making much of a sound at all. It’s old, been washed a hundred times, and the knife is sharp. Clint wishes, for a split second, it hadn’t been so easy. That he’d have had a reason to rip it. Energy, restless and roiling, is still crawling between his musculature and skin. It’s ugly and reckless. 

Bruce’s naked chest is too fucking clean. Clint scrapes his nails over the ugly twist of scar beneath Bruce’s ribs. He stuck his fingers into that cut for days to make sure it wouldn’t heal smooth. “I get to do that,” Clint says. “You can’t stop me.”

“Yes,” Bruce says, voice soft and breathless. 

Clint touches the tip of the knife to the hollow at Bruce’s throat. 

The thing is. The thing is that there was a moment, on this last mission that’s actually supposed to be representative of what Clint _does_ , where he was on the ground on his back, with a boot in the center of his chest and a gun pointed at his face. There was a moment where his bow was gone and his guns were gone and he knife was trapped underneath him and his wrists were pinned down by others and he knew he was going to die. 

Clint has had more moments than most people where he knew he was going to die, and he’s alive. He’s never been right so far. But that doesn’t change the fact that he knew in his gut and his heart and in the beat of blood in his ears that he was going to die. And the only other fucking thing he could think was _I’m sorry, Bruce_. 

He can’t cut Bruce. He can’t. 

Clint stands suddenly, too violently. The knife clatters out of his hand and skitters somewhere he doesn’t see. His stomach is roiled up beneath his ribs and his breath comes in short, hard pants. This is so entirely and completely wrong. It doesn’t make sense that he could get up after Nat fired three shots into three different heads and run for an hour to safety. And then twelve hours later cut someone open from chin to pelvis so their blood spilled out with their secrets. And then not be able to do _this_. 

“Clint,” Bruce says, and suddenly he’s not the thing Clint takes to their room, he’s the goddamn fucking doctor. “Clint, can you. If you cut one of my hands free, I can do the other.”

This is backwards. This is _unacceptable_. Clint fumbles in his pocket for his utility knife, the one that he actually uses as a less metaphorical tool. His hands shake he pushes out the smallest blade. He’s not sure in the slightest that he’ll be able to cut the zip ties without making Bruce’s skin look like raw hamburger. Obedience is the last thing Clint is good at, but he kneels anyway. 

Bruce’s fingers are purple around the nail beds. He forgot to check how tight he was pulling the ties. Clint has to shove and twist the knife to get it between skin and plastic, and a bright line of blood trickles down the side of Bruce’s wrist. But the tie gives and Bruce’s hand jerks free. 

He extracts the knife from Clint’s fingers without asking, or even all that much hesitation. Teeth gritted against the sharp sting, he cuts his other hand free and then. Then they’re both sitting on the floor. 

Bruce’s hand is only fractionally, marginally uncertain when it touches Clint’s shoulder. Clint flinches, rolling protectively inward. And maybe Bruce knows and doesn’t care that his body language says to fuck off, or maybe it looks like some backwards invitation. But he awkwardly, carefully, firmly circles his arms around Clint’s shoulders and tucks his chin to Clint’s neck. He doesn’t seem to care that Clint’s face is shoved into his hands.

*

Clint loses a little time. 

Not in the way where he blinks and six hours are gone and he couldn’t swear where he’s been or what he’s been doing, but. In the way where Bruce shifts a little and he’s suddenly aware that they’ve been sitting on the concrete floor long enough for Clint to go stiff from his knees to his neck and that the raw spots on Bruce’s wrists have started to scab over. Blood’s still sluggishly dripping onto Clint’s shoulder, but even the streaks on his shirt are starting stiffen as they dry. 

“I --” Clint starts, but it comes out more a croak than anything else. He coughs, shaking his head. Bruce looks up, head cocked slightly to the side. His expression is carefully, consideringly flat. Maybe he knows Clint fairly well. “I need to take care of your wrists.” 

Bruce blinks. “They’re okay.” 

“I don’t want to run the risk of them getting infected and having to explain to the other guy why he doesn’t have hands to smash with,” Clint says. He’s aiming for levity, but doesn’t quite make it. There’s maybe a little more truth than he intended, and the ache is his muscles and hands and hurts is starting to color his words. He feels grubby down past his skin and muscles to the marrow of his bones. 

Clint is not good at fucking up. 

No. He’s always been good at fucking up, he’s not good at fixing it afterward. 

The first time he ever had a mission go pear shaped in the field, Coulson had to talk him down from the ledge for a good four hours. The ledge being proverbial, that time, with Clint standing in his room with a duffle over one shoulder and a freshly minted fake ID ready to escape into. And the time Natasha was almost killed outside Cape Town? Clint came very close to breaking a fellow SHIELD agent’s collarbone when they suggested it was her own sloppiness that sent things sideways. 

“Okay,” Bruce agrees. “Can we. Will you take me upstairs? Please?”

Bruce trips a little over the please, because he’s not good at asking for what he needed. Except, Clint is fairly certain way deep down in the part of his gut that can’t lie that Bruce isn’t being careful for anything that he needs. It almost rankles, in a way that has nothing at all to do with Bruce himself. Because Clint knows he’s not going to say no, that Bruce doesn’t make suggestions in this place. 

“Yeah,” Clint says. “Yeah, okay.”

It really should be Bruce leaning heavily against Clint’s side to the elevator, moving with post-encounter lassitude that makes him heavy, warm, and pliant. Like the bands around his lungs have finally eased up enough for him to really be able to relax. 

It’s not entirely dissimilar from that, really. Bruce still holds himself close to Clint’s side and gives the impression that he’s propping himself up on Clint. But there’s a care to the way he moves, the way he drops his head onto Clint’s shoulder. The way he delicately hooks two fingers on the waist of Clint’s pants. God, Clint does not do people being careful with him and some reckless, angry voice in the back of his mind says to turn Bruce around and frog-march him back into the room. 

And then a quieter voice, the voice of his conscience and better half that sounds like Nat and Coulson speaking in unison, asks what he’s going to do? If he can’t even break Bruce’s skin right now. 

It’s very quiet in the elevator. Clint leans against the wall, tips his head back and closes his eyes. He listens to the soft chimes of the floor passing, out of the lower levels to the main floors to the personal floors. Bruce is a warm sense hovering next to him. Just before they land on Clint’s floor, Bruce brushes his knuckles against the back of Clint’s hand and says nothing. 

They’re bad at this. 

A certain level of automation takes over once they’re in Clint’s space. 

Go to the bathroom. Turn on the shower. Test the water. Get a towel. Ignore Bruce watching him standing in the doorway, arms wrapped around his middle. Get the first aid kit from beneath the sink. “Strip.” 

Bruce folds his sliced shirt into the trashcan and toes off his shoes. He sits the edge of the toilet’s lid to take off his socks, folding them neatly and tucking the pair into one of his discarded loafers. He pops the button on his pants and slides them down without having to undo the zipper. He’s not bony, naked, but a little on the gaunt side. That’s fine, Clint thinks, he’s gaunt too. 

“Clint,” Bruce says, pushing his fingers through his hair. His wrists look like he was struggling against handcuffs. Which isn’t actually entirely inaccurate, Clint thinks, and his stomach twists. 

“Yeah?”

Bruce opens his mouth, but closes it with a soft sigh. He stands and that sends Clint back half a step. He’s used to being the one pushing into Bruce’s space, not the other way around. It’s not really the same, though, because Bruce comes close like he’s approaching a wounded animal. He catches his fingers in the hem of Clint’s shirt. “What?” Clint asks, voice low. 

“Just,” Bruce murmurs, biting his bottom lip. “Just, please. Let me.” 

Clint lets Bruce strip his shirt over his head and set it on the counter. He lets Bruce unbutton his pants and push them and his boxers down to a puddle around his ankles. Clint toes off his shoes, too, and steps barefoot and naked onto the tile floor. They’ve never been naked together before, Clint thinks. He has no idea what he’s doing. His skin feels too thin. 

Bruce pulls back the shower door and beckons. “Come on?”

*

There’s something not necessarily soothing, but numbing about standing underneath the spray. There’s enough room in the shower that they don’t have to be close, not really, but. Bruce stands in front of Clint with the spray catching his face and over his chest. He holds out his hands, palms up.

Clint is decent at field triage, out of necessity. He rubs away the blood caked around Bruce’s wrists and checks the cuts. They’re wide and ugly looking, but shallow. He knows they won’t scar so long as Bruce leaves them alone. And they’re on the back of wrists, which means no inherent need to explain to the rest of the team what happened. No concerned looks from Fury. No suggestions that Bruce sit down with a SHIELD psych. Bruce hates the SHIELD psychs with a kind of hopeless, frustrated rage that’s only half about them. 

“You’ll be fine,” Clint says. 

Bruce nods. And then, after a long pause. “So will you.”

That catches Clint in the soft spots between his ribs. He flinches, fingers spasming tight around Bruce’s wrists, so that Bruce gasps a little. His eyes flutter shut for a second, but he opens them again. His expression isn’t pitying or conciliatory, it’s flatly determined. Knowing. A little bleak, maybe, and Clint shivers. 

“I don’t know what it’s like to do what you do,” Bruce says, words hesitant and careful and uncertain. “I don’t know what it’s like to be in the field. But I do know something about waking up the next morning, and going to sleep the next night. Again and again. I know about that.” 

“Bruce--”

“No, I--” Bruce curls his hands into fists. “You said your hand got in a fight with a boot and I can see the impression of kicks on your back. I don’t want you or need you to tell me what happened. I don’t need you to apologize. Just. Stand here with me, please? For me. Stand here and when we’re done please take me to bed. That’s what I’m asking for.”

Clint can’t say anything. So he nods, and pulls Bruce to his chest.


End file.
